The invention relates to the field of data processing, and more particularly to the determination of pricing information using custom rules.
More and more software developing companies employed product and service customization strategies and also customized pricing strategies in order to gain greater profit and in order to increase the number of customers. Nowadays, prices for particular software may depend on the usage time, hardware resources (memory, processor, storage, network bandwidth) available for the application, the kind of customer (student, nonprofit organization, profit organization), usage type (commercial, backup, developing, production), the version of a software product, discounts, special offers, or individual contracts. The complexity and variability of modern pricing strategies is a problem for many automated software billing systems which are currently not able to cope with this complexity.
In particular, in a situation when large companies run a plurality of application programs on a plurality of processing machines, current software auditing applications (SAA) typically used by the companies are not operable to cope with the complexity of current pricing strategies. Thus, organizations using current software auditing applications for monitoring their costs—as well as cloud-based software service providers using SAAB for billing purposes—are often forced to calculate the total costs (or prices) manually, or at least they have to perform some manual corrections on automatically generated cost (or price) reports. This is not only time consuming but also error prone.